homepage Forums Air Combat & Civil Aviation Battle of Britain + Battle of Britain II Here's what happened (Continued)

Folks,

It is 73 comfortable degrees outside at 10:30 AM on this sunny Thursday. I have had such a hard day..... Already I have dressed, made my bed, ate my cup of oatmeal seasoned with a pleasant tasting coffee creamer. Oh, you think that a bit odd do you? We are out of milk and I thought that mixed with water might be a good substitute. It was a very good one. One must think outside the cereal box sometime. Zena has been fed and watered. The duct tape on her mouth has been changed, I have turned the knob on the radio to "on", booted my notebook and launched the browser. Next I carefully navigated here to greet you. OK, there was no duct tape on the cat's mouth at any time although when she insisted i get up before the crack of noon I had considered it.

Firefox has had a major upgrade that sent several favored extensions down the Internet toilet. In November of this year all support for every extension not converted to a new standard will end. Chances are none of my extensions will work after that. I have read many complaints regarding the changes some from developers who say they will no longer update their extensions as it is too difficult to meet the new standard. This griping is not unusual. I won't complain. I will just switch back to IE or Chrome and wait for the dust to settle in Foxville.

Last night after the upgrade, I noticed my You Tube videos had become choppy. Looking for a fix, I went online and found several hundred million others had at one time or another experienced the same or similar problem. So many kindred sufferers is usually a good thing in that you are more likely to find many "Fixes" and one of these may be the medicine your computer needs. I found a fix that seems to have greatly improved my viewing pleasure. It seems Firefox saves its sessions at a default rate of about every 15 seconds. The "hack" I found on G-hacks website showed me how to change the setting to 100 seconds. That spread the conflict between Firefox and You Tube wider between events and I no longer notice it. In addition to all those other extremely tiring chores I mentioned I also got out my trusty computer log book in which I log any changes I make on my computers and copied down the relevant info should I forget the bookmark to G-Hacks or whatever. I highly recommend you use something similar. Having that info handy has saved me more than once.

I hope those of you who had not watched the BoB video I posted the link for have seen it now. I hope you liked it. I launched Chrome later on last night to see how You Tube videos ran on that. They ran really well. I watched a very interesting "Dogfights" episode on the Grumman Hellcat fighter. I don't know what computing system and simulation they use to make those. I surely would love to have something like it. The Hellcat replaced the shopworn but valiant Wildcat that held the far more agile A6M Zero at bay until the Hellcat arrived in the Pacific. The Hellcat had twice the horsepower of the obsolete Wildcat. It could climb and turn with the Zero It had 6 .50 cals and could out dive the Zero. This was important because the go-to tactic of any Zero driver finding himself in trouble was to dive away toward the sea.

The awesome Hellcat in the hands of a good pilot was a very nasty surprise for any experienced Zero pilot used to shooting down Wildcats for sport. Encountering a Hellcat was a nightmare for the poorly armored Zeros. Zooming upstairs expected the unwary Wildcat pilot who tried to follow to soon stall out and become easy prey. The man in the Zero might suddenly notice the big, blue nose of the "Wildcat" was still hanging on his tail at the top of his own climb! On his way down to a watery grave with his fuel tanks on fore and missing his tail, perhaps the Japanese pilot had just enough time to realize his mistake? Watch that one too. You should be able to find it.

Brother Fittop rightly mentioned to me that he had actually come here in the first place to read about aviation related topics and had stayed because he enjoyed reading our rather eclectic writings instead . He never meant to criticize of course however I do think this should remind us of how this thread began as purely aviation inspired. That said, perhaps we should all try to add more aviation oriented topics to our varied mix. That especially applies to me.